LEGO Indiana Jones Preview

Share.

We visit Traveller's Tales and take a thorough look at this summer's biggest block-buster.

By Martin Robinson

Katie Price and Peter Andre, the internet and porn, rice and peas: some things were just meant to be. So it was with LEGO and Star Wars, combining first to introduce a line of must-have toys, then going on to produce some of the most broadly accessible and utterly charming games of recent times. Despite primarily gunning for the younger gamer, LEGO Star Wars had the power to transport even the most world-weary back to the first time they sat slack-jawed in front of George Lucas's opus. Now, with the LEGO series exploring Indiana Jones territory, we accepted an invite to series developer Traveller's Tales for a look at the new game, producer Nick Ricks acting as our guide.

Nestling in a leafy corner of Cheshire, Traveller's Tales's studio should provoke a fierce outbreak of green skin among LEGO fans. Cabinets brimming with some of the most desirable LEGO models of the past few years line the walls - in one corner sits a sizable LEGO Star Destroyer, while another hosts a collection of Indiana Jones dioramas.

Don't expect Indy to be packing heat for much of the game.

It's no surprise that Traveller's Tales has trained its eyes on Lucas's much-loved matinee world of dusty leather jackets and archeological hijinks. Indiana Jones and LEGO make a pairing perhaps even more fitting than the developer's previous space-bound union, the more playful humour of Indy's whip-cracking yarns squeezing snugly into the template established through preceding LEGO Star Wars games.

With such a strong formula already in place, it's easy to assume that producing the LEGO Indiana Jones game would be a breeze. Surely it's simply a matter of dumping a couple of temples into the Tatooinie desert, giving Luke Skywalker a whip and - while you're at it - why not just throw in the Dr. Jones model that made a cameo in The Complete Saga? However tempting it might have been to throw together this new game from the bricks of the last, Ricks assures us there's a little more going on in LEGO Indiana Jones: "It's a natural assumption that both Star Wars and Indiana Jones are action properties so it would be an easy fix to port one across – and that's what we started to do, but before you knew it, it felt like LEGO Star Wars set in 1945 and you were just running around blasting everything, flicking levers."

LEGO Indy's certainly a lot more agile than his space-faring counterparts.

As a result, LEGO Indiana Jones is box-fresh, built from the ground up and introducing a host of new features to the franchise. Naturally, while there's some cross-over between the two series, it's more than locations that set them apart – Indy's as resourceful as Han Solo is cunning, and it's this aspect of the character that's been brought to the fore. "What we had to do was strip it all back and look at what makes Indy films different to Star Wars films and use that guideline to apply to the games," Ricks explains. "A lot of it's about exploration, solving puzzles and riddles and things like that. We took that as our mantra and applied it to how you use LEGO in the game. In LEGO Star Wars you obviously had the Force, and that involved building. We wanted to take it on."

There's much more emphasis on discovery and creation in LEGO Indy, with appropriate puzzles now taking the place of some of the character-based challenges of the Star Wars games. "We've given players the ability to pick up and move LEGO, and combine it in different areas to build something new", says Ricks. "A good example being that to fix the plane at the end of Hovitos, the engine's broken and you have to find all the different bits and put them back in the plane, all while being blow-darted to death. That, we felt, was the next step for LEGO and it was equally fitting for the Indiana Jones feel."